WE have failed to learn the lessons from the biggest terrorist attack on American soil.
Post-Sept. 11 reviews established that government agencies entrusted with providing security and intelligence for our country had failed. These failures of intelligence and proactive prevention resulted in the World Trade Center bombing, the Fort Hood shooting, and the attempted bombing in Times Square and of an airplane on Christmas Day. Furthermore, during the times of catastrophic events, as evidenced during the Hurricane Katrina and Deepwater Horizon disasters, our public safety system has failed to provide comfort or confidence to the people.
Despite the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, spending billions and moving pieces around, no substantive transformative changes have occurred in the homeland security arena in the last nine years.
There are approximately 18,000 local police agencies in our country, employing just under 800,000 sworn officers. From the DHS, which encompasses 22 different agencies, to the CIA, FBI, state and municipal police agencies, our law enforcement system is beset with conflicts of interest, turf battles, gaps in intelligence sharing, insular mentality, and uneven quality of service to the communities.
The entrenched bureaucratic inertia and lack of vision at the federal level has made the intelligence agencies lose sight of their mission: protection of citizenry.
In the 21st century, we need to adapt to the threats we face. It is time to transform our policing and intelligence practices to reduce our reliance on a failed model of intelligence gathering at the federal level and to provide proactive protection to our communities from crime and terrorism. We need a paradigmatic shift; we must move to local law enforcement for intelligence acquisition and analysis.
Furthermore, we need to consolidate our fragmented police agencies to provide seamless, standardized and superior service to our communities. Such transformative changes in policing and intelligence acquisition would be more effective than what we have currently. It would create unified leadership, more efficiency, transparency, be more cost effective and responsive to citizen concerns.
Providing security to American citizens is unnecessarily complex and inefficient. Each state should consolidate all local police departments into a single statewide agency. The consolidation should be linked with horizontal information networks between the states that connect to a national intelligence collection and analysis grid. Such consolidation would rely on intelligence-led policing and focus on prevention of crime and terrorism, instead of being a reactive force with primary focus on post-crime investigation and prosecution.
There are manifold benefits to such consolidation. Historical studies have discussed the benefits in terms of streamlining, cost cutting and downsizing. Additional benefits would be standardized training and improved services, greatly enhanced communication and intelligence sharing at the local and state level.Furthermore, during catastrophic events, including terrorist strikes or natural calamities, a uniform agency could provide much more streamlined, effective and uniform response.
However, the most important benefit of consolidation would be to ready our law enforcement agencies to face the changing threats to homeland security.
As the Washington Post investigation this summer revealed, the national intelligence gathering apparatus has become overwhelmed with information and an inability to parse the information into specific actionable intelligence.
Analysis requires human judgment that only the feet on the ground can provide, not those sitting in buildings and gathering raw information. Cops on the beat are much more in tune with what goes around in the community they serve, something that no federal agency or academic analyst can match.
Furthermore, the agency entrusted with domestic terrorism and intelligence functions, the FBI, is incapable of matching the sheer numbers and the expertise that local police departments bring to the table. The FBI employs fewer than 14,000 special agents, compared to almost 800,000 sworn local officers across the nation. Moving to a consolidated statewide policing system would keep information acquisition and analysis more intelligent and useful. Such integration would enhance collaboration between the local and federal agencies, something that is not going to happen under federally imposed top down information acquisition and analysis mode. Under the consolidated model, there will be a reduction in duplication of effort, elimination of intelligence gaps and failures, and an increase in collaboration between federal, state and local partners.
In a dynamically shifting world, where continuously transforming threats require ever-increasing flexibility from our public safety agencies, we can't rely on what has worked in the past.
It is time for true consolidation of our intelligence resources and our physical resources. It is time for implementation of scientific intelligence-led policing and counterterrorism that focuses on prevention instead of post-event response.
Lt. Sunil Dutta is patrol watch commander at Foothill Division for the Los Angeles Police Department. The views presented here are his own and do not represent the LAPD.
